Scaling up with conditional basic income

[ala.tusz.am]

@adintium

Maybe we could do a snapshot/poll to identify the validators that qualify as “smaller, more active and long-term”?

Yeah, I think if the temp-check proposal passed, the next steps would be moving into a working group to do more research about exactly what type of criteria would be involved here.

@adintium

The above are just some examples to highlight my point, I’m not attacking any validators, just to be clear

Yup, this clarity is super important! We want to ensure that the criteria (which have not been defined) is in line with the community’s goal. Your comments are a great step in that direction.

@adintium

By the way… if any validator from the bottom 75 would still like to validate the consumer chain, then technically they could, right? Essentially they would be able to validate without any jailing/slashing conditions?

AFAIK, they could.

@adintium

So I guess if we implement it the way it is now, it would be up to each of the validator in the bottom 75 to show their social/community commitments then (if they can afford to), which the top 100 don’t have the privilege of and would need to validate regardless.

Implement what? The CBI, or Replicated Security as it is now?

Something to explore together is, like you touched on, how CBI might interact with any consumer-chain side feature like soft-opt out. Does soft-opt out totally solve the problem? Does it need something complementary? Curious to hear your thoughts.

@Neutron

Releases patched to include a “soft opt-out” feature will be launched and tested as part of the internal and public rehearsal described in the timeline below. This feature would allow the bottom 5% of validators by voting power (74 validators at the time of writing) to be free of any penalty for “opting-out” of running nodes for the Neutron network. These validators would still be considered part of Neutron’s validator set and earn a small share of the staking rewards but would not be jailed nor slashed for downtime.

This mechanism does not require the Cosmos Hub to upgrade and is expected to lead to a drastic reduction in the cost of onboarding Neutron by entirely removing the burden of running consumer chain nodes from the least profitable validators’ shoulders. Nonetheless, it represents a compromise on the chain’s liveness, which could translate into longer/trickier chain upgrades and increased halting risk.

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@blacklodge , welcome! It’s great to have you here, especially with such an articulate and intriguing first post.

I think the dynamic enforced commission that you pointed out is an interesting mechanism that I’d be interested in exploring deeper.

Ultimately, it seems like what will be needed to solve the long-term issues is a combination of better UI / UX for delegators, some kind of governance controlled lever to shift or incentivize delegations to flow downward, and short-term support (soft-opt out / customizable commission / subsidies) to keep the validator set afloat until there is a meaningful shift toward more evenly distributed stake.

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@blacklodge

I do recall (in a past life) observing & modeling the aggregate outcomes of regulatory intercession via price floors, ceilings and subsidies and being surprised at just how often the consumer – the intended beneficiary – got the short end of the stick.

Could you say more about this? In particular I am curious about which party you view as a consumer in terms of a CBI-like solution. Would it be the delegators?

Thanks again for your comments, I do hope we’ll see you around more often and looking forward to continuing the discussion!